The Poison Artist Page 18

  “You said—wait. What?”

  “Thujone? What the killer’s been giving all the victims, after the vecuronium wears off?”

  “What about it?”

  “That’s what makes absinthe, right? That’s the chemical in wormwood. They used to think it was the wormwood—the thujone—that made guys like van Gogh insane. I think it’s a GABA receptor antagonist. Which, if you think about it, would be a pretty good thing to give someone you were about to torture.”

  Caleb looked at Henry and then at the bottle on the table. Its cold green glow.

  “Thujone,” Caleb said.

  It was all he could think to say, but his mind was going a lot faster. Henry was right about one thing. Blocking a person’s GABA receptors would be a perfect first step before lighting him up with pain. The nerves would be primed and ready to fire, the pathways cleared all the way up.

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “Thujone. Don’t tell me you didn’t know it’s in absinthe.”

  “No,” Caleb said. “I didn’t.”

  “Look at you. Big chemistry guy, learning something from a lowly coroner,” Henry said. That half-smile was back on his face, but there wasn’t much joy in it. “Who got you drinking that stuff, anyway? Bridget?”

  Caleb shook his head.

  “Not Bridget. It was just— I don’t know. An idea I had. Something I wanted to try.”

  “Looks like you enjoy it.”

  “I guess so.”

  When Henry finally left, Caleb dumped his coffee in the sink and then went to the dining table. He pulled out a chair and sat before the bottle of absinthe, turning it to read the label. There was nothing helpful there, no breakdown of the bottle’s contents. But what had only been a whisper for the last week was now a steadily building roar. He supposed he’d been walking toward this, that it would not have been possible to ignore it forever. His job was to make inferences based on known facts, to build bridges that connected the known to the white space beyond it. He wasn’t like Kennon—being good and being right were not disconnected concepts in Caleb’s profession. He looked at the bottle and knew what he had to do.

  He went down the hall to his bathroom, showered, then dressed in a hurry. The lab would be empty on Christmas Eve, so he didn’t bother shaving. He took a leather briefcase from his study, then went back to the dining table and put the bottle of Berthe de Joux inside it. He paused a moment then, before going to the garage, to think about what he was doing. His place in all this. He looked at the scabs on the backs of his fingers and touched the bruise on his forehead. He thought of Emmeline’s arms around him, and the waxen corpse of a man who’d been tortured before the ebbing tide wedged him under a sewage pipe, and the sound of Bridget crying into the phone from the lonely cold of her studio on Bush Street.

  There was more.

  There were the two hundred and fifty unanswered emails from Joanne Tremont with questions about the NIH grant application. The sad way Henry had nodded to him before stepping onto the walkway and going to his car with his back hunched against the rain.

  Eighteen

  THE LAB WAS empty, but not quiet. Sounds could travel through the air ducts, could echo along the dark utility tunnels from other parts of the hospital. And no hospital was ever silent. Over the hum of the equipment powering up, Caleb could hear the din coming from the ceiling vents. Another murmur came from under the floor, where a trapdoor to the utility tunnel lay hidden beneath a lab tech’s workbench. Voices and machines. A woman’s distant crying. Footsteps rushing down a hard-tiled hallway. All this was blended together and piped in, like strange elevator music.

  He poured a drop of the absinthe into a sample vial, then loaded it into the mass spectrometer’s automatic feed tray. The machine was programmed to start its cycle as soon as the power-up was complete. He watched it a while, listening as its circuits warmed, then went into his office.

  There were emails from Bridget, four of them within the last hour. The subject lines said enough: Please.

  Please, Caleb.

  I understand.

  He didn’t open them, didn’t read them. Instead he brought up a database of organic compounds and searched for thujone. He sketched the skeletal structures of its two most common isomers on a notepad, drawing wedges and hashed lines to differentiate the three-dimensional angles of their carbon bonds. He looked at the lines and tapped his pencil eraser against his chin, thinking it through.

  Later, if he needed to, he could run more delicate tests to probe at the molecular structure of the samples. He’d be able to tell if the thujone in the victims’ tissues matched the isometric fingerprints of Berthe de Joux. But the first task was simply to find out how much thujone, of any isometric form, was in a drop of Emmeline’s absinthe. He pulled up the results from his tests on Richard Salazar’s tissue samples, studied the spectral lines. The man had been pumped full of the chemical, something close to sixty milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Enough to send a jolt through all his neural pathways, to fire his muscles into painful convulsions.

  Caleb looked at his computer monitor. The blinking window in the corner told him that his first sample run was complete.

  He pushed back from his desk and walked into the lab, crossing the darkened space to the printer. He pulled the pages as they came out, then stood under the reddish glow of an exit sign to read them. His head cast a shadow over the paper so that he had to hold it out and lean back to get enough light to read it. There were scores of organic compounds in the absinthe, but there was only one line he cared about.

  He found it and followed it with his fingertip, tracing the line to its end and then scanning back to read its value. He’d been trembling since he left the house, buzzing with panic. But after he saw the numbers, he could hold the pages without shaking.

  He went back to his office with the printout and compared it to Richard Salazar’s test results, holding the two graphs side by side. He’d read the values correctly the first time. The charts were accurate. He’d run all the tests himself, had used equipment no other lab could match. There could be no mistake. Richard Salazar was full of thujone, but he couldn’t have gotten it by drinking Berthe de Joux. There simply wasn’t enough thujone in the absinthe to make it work. He’d have dropped dead of alcohol poisoning long before getting anywhere close.

  Caleb sat down and closed his eyes.

  The warning that had grown to a roar was fading again to a whisper. It didn’t go away completely, of course. There were still too many connections, too many loose facts. But he could live with the whisper. They had made promises, after all, and promises had mass. A true weight that could be measured. If he could isolate the words in their hearts and run them through his machines, he could show their real values.

  I will never lie to you, she’d said. I will never hurt you.

  And early this morning, a new one: I’m yours.

  His computer chimed and he looked up at the screen. Bridget had emailed again. It was too much. He switched off the monitor and stood.

  It was dark, and he was sober again, when he got back to the medical center. He’d left the seawall just before sunset and had walked back through the avenues, looking at the blur of Christmas lights, at the flickering menorahs in the front windows of a few scattered homes. Then he was climbing the steep hill up to the hospital, the Muni tram on the N-Judah line grinding east behind him, blue sparks falling from the overhead wires.

  He stopped and looked across the street at the front entrance to the hospital. There were no cars moving. Two of the closest streetlamps had blinked and gone out, so that the center of the block was dark. A half-circle turnabout led to the main hospital doors. Parked there, idling in a cloud of steaming exhaust, was a ghost-gray coupe. A car from the thirties or forties, polished and gleaming in the soft light that came from the hospital. Its headlights lit the falling rain. He looked past the long hood, past the white-walled front tire, to the woman who was leaning against the driver’s side door, one foot perched on t
he narrow running board.

  Emmeline.

  She wore a black cashmere cloak over her dress, and that fell away to reveal the bare white of her arm when she raised her hand to greet him.

  He crossed Parnassus, stepping past the puddles, and came to her. She took his free hand with both of hers, pulled him close, and kissed him. He’d been in the rain for three hours, but her hands were cold around his.

  “Hello, Caleb,” she said, when she broke off the kiss. She didn’t let go of his hand, and used it to hold him closer.

  “Emmeline.”

  “I said it’d be soon, didn’t I?”

  “You did.”

  “I couldn’t wait any longer,” she said.

  “Neither could I.”

  She pressed her lips together as she looked up at him. He’d seen her do that once before, when she came into the Pied Piper and studied the Maxfield Parrish painting, looked over each man in the room, and walked out.

  “Would you like to play a game?” she said.

  “All right.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you remember everything I promised you?”

  He nodded, and she smiled. Her cheeks were flushed with cold, and there were droplets of mist in her hair and on her eyelashes. She released his hand, reached into the folds of her cloak, and came out holding a black silk scarf. She handed it to him.

  “Get in, Caleb. And then tie that on.”

  “Over my eyes?”

  She nodded.

  “Your telephone. Are you carrying it?”

  “In my pocket.”

  “Turn it off,” she said. “Show it to me. Let me see you do it.”

  He did as she asked, and afterward, she took his hand again and squeezed it, briefly tightening his grip on the blindfold. Then he was walking around the hood of the car, feeling the heat coming off the front-mounted radiator and seeing the steam rise away from the four chrome-plated headlamp housings. The statuette on the radiator cap was an armored knight, holding a sword and shield. He got to the passenger side of the car, this time machine that had rolled out of the early half of another century, and pulled on the solid silver door handle. The heavy door swung out, balanced on its hinges. He set his briefcase in the foot well, pulled off his coat and shook the rain from it, then got inside and shut the door. Emmeline was already behind the wheel. The car smelled of her perfume, and of well-oiled leather. Its coachwork looked as new as the day it had rolled off the line. Beneath his feet, he could feel the idling engine, its power coming in loping waves through the soles of his shoes.

  “We’ll get some heat going,” she said. “But first, the scarf.”

  “Okay.”

  He unfolded the scarf, doubled it down its length to give it thickness, and closed his eyes as he tied it around his face. He knotted it at the back of his head.

  “Nice and tight?” she asked. Her whisper was close enough that he could feel her breath against his neck.

  “Tight enough. I can’t see anything.”

  “No peeking. That’s against the rules. All right?”

  “Okay.”

  “You know why?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Guess, Caleb. It’s easy.”

  Her fingertips traced his lips, glided down his chin to his neck. Then the flat of her hand was moving across his chest. Over his sternum and down. He hadn’t liked the blindfold, hadn’t wanted to play the game of putting it on. But her touch was gathering the fear from him, sweeping it away like dust.

  “You’re ready to show me where you live,” Caleb said. “But you’re not ready for me to know how to get there.”

  Her hand stopped at his belt buckle, and then she was whispering into his ear again.

  “Get comfortable, Caleb,” she said. “It’s a bit of a drive.”

  She took her hand off his belt, and then Caleb heard her shift the car into gear. The old coupe, heavy and powerful, rolled with the smooth motion of a ship. He’d never been in a car like it. Even with the blindfold, it was like falling into another time. He felt safe here, in the car, with Emmeline next to him. That was as warm and as good as the heater blowing across his knees and onto his lap. He held his hands together atop his coat and leaned back in the bench seat.

  Emmeline took a left on Parnassus and drove west for a minute or two before taking another left. He guessed they were on Ninth or Tenth Avenue, but then Emmeline began taking rights and lefts until Caleb lost all sense of place. Five minutes went by as she wound the car through the quiet avenues, circling and jagging, block by block.

  “If you’re wondering whether I’m lost yet, you can relax,” he said. “I am.”

  “Good.”

  She made another turn and then he felt her hand on his knee. He covered her fingers with his.

  “This car,” he said. “I’ve never seen one like it.”

  “An Invicta,” she said.

  “British?”

  “I think. He got it. When we were in Victoria, or maybe Vancouver. We brought it back on the ferry, into Seattle. That was when I was little.”

  “So this was his car.”

  “But now it’s mine,” she said, and her voice brightened with the words. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s beautiful,” Caleb said. “Someday, maybe I’ll even get to see it.”

  She laughed a little and moved her hand higher on his leg, tracing a figure eight against the cloth of his khakis.

  “Someday,” she said. “And that’ll be soon.”

  Now she was driving in a single direction, following one road. She went a long stretch without slowing or stopping, so that Caleb guessed either they were crossing Golden Gate Park, or she’d hit it lucky with the lights and hadn’t been caught by a red. Or perhaps she was just running through the reds without stopping. That would be easy enough tonight. Before he’d gotten into the car and put on the blindfold, the city had been as dark and empty as the beginning of a dream. A stage, maybe. A set for Emmeline, where she could make anything happen. He pictured the row houses as simple façades, propped up in the back by angled two-by-fours, lit from behind with stage lighting. Hidden wires and trapdoors to fill out the illusion.

  “You’re smiling about something,” Emmeline said.

  “Are you watching me or the road?”

  “You,” she said. “I’m always watching you.”

  Now they went into a series of curves, and Caleb could tell the road was banked against the outside turns. The car stuck to the pavement like it was on rails, its motion so stately that Caleb had no idea of their speed.

  “This is where you ask me, ‘Are we there yet?’ and I tell you, ‘Soon, Caleb.’”

  “Are we there yet?”

  “Not even close,” she said. “Relax.”

  She slowed the car and he felt them turn onto a new street. Then they must have been in a neighborhood of right-angled avenues, where Emmeline once again took them on a route of turns so frequent they could only be random. At one point, she slowed the car and did a U-turn, pausing before accelerating in the new direction to lean across the seat and kiss Caleb’s neck, just beneath his left earlobe.

  After ten minutes of wandering, they were moving again, holding steadily in one direction. Caleb heard rain hitting the windshield and then the rhythmic swipe of the wipers. Emmeline accelerated through a turn and the road straightened out and leveled. The sound of the engine and the tires changed abruptly, as if someone had taken all the bass away from the notes they sang. Once a second there was a double thump as the car’s front tires crossed to a new section of the roadway, followed immediately by the rear tires doing the same. In all of San Francisco, there was only one span of road that sounded like this.

  As surely as if he’d taken off his blindfold, Caleb knew she was driving him across the Golden Gate Bridge. She couldn’t have known how well he knew that route, how many times he’d made that crossing.

  But he lost track of things again after th
ey got off the bridge. Emmeline drove him for another twenty minutes. Steep, winding roads in the Marin Headlands. Then they were going down for a long time, and she took a final right turn and pulled to a stop.

  “Wait here.”

  She got out of the car but left the door open. He heard the sound of a rolling gate sliding on its track. Then she was back inside, and they pulled forward, moving slowly for a few seconds before she stopped again.

  “Stay there and keep the blindfold on, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  She shut off the engine and stepped from the car, shutting her door this time. For a moment, he was alone, and could hear nothing from outside. Then his door opened and he felt her hand on his shoulder.

  “I’ll help you out,” she said. “Watch your head.”

  He stepped from the car, her fingers on the back of his head until he was clear of the doorframe. When he stood to his full height, she guided him two steps back so that she could swing the door shut. Then she took his left arm in hers and started him on a slow walk, away from the car.

  He heard the bridge’s foghorn, a long, low note in the distance to his right. The wind was salty and damp.

  “There’s a set of steps,” Emmeline said. “Here. Feel the riser?”

  “Yes.”

  “Careful—they’re tall.”

  They climbed a wooden staircase, the steps loose and wobbly underfoot. The side of the building was to his right. He trailed his fingers against its clapboard wall as they climbed. Sixteen steps in a straight line, and then they were on a landing of some kind.

  “Stay there. You can hold on to the railing. Here.”

  She put his hand on the splintered rail. He heard a jangle of keys, then deadbolt locks sliding past rusty strike plates. Three of them.

  She worked the door handle, and he heard the hinges move, felt the swish of air past his face as the door swung by.

  “Do you mind much? Doing all this for me?” Emmeline asked. The keys clattered again as she pulled them from the last lock and put them away. “You still want this, right?”